duties of obedience and gratitude; whatever were the fruits of their industry, their patron and his family inherited the third part, or even the whole of their fortune, if they died without children and without a testament. Justinian respected the rights of patrons, but his indulgence removed the badge of disgrace from the two inferior orders of freedmen; whoever ceased to be a slave, obtained without reserve or delay the station of a citizen; and at length the dignity of an ingenuous birth _was created_ or _supposed_ by the omnipotence of the emperor."[1] [Footnote 1: Vide Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London edition of 1825, vol. 3d, chap. 44, p. 183.] The above account of slavery and its modifications will be found in strictest conformity with the Institutes of Justinian. Thus, book 1st, title 3d, it is said: "The first general division of persons in respect to their rights is into freemen and slaves." The same title, sec. 4th: "Slaves are born such, or become so. They are born such of bondwomen; they become so either by _the law of nations_, as by capture, or by the civil law." Section 5th: "In the condition of slaves there is no diversity; but among free persons there are many. Thus some are _ingenui_ or freemen, others _libertini_ or freedmen." Tit. 4th. DE INGENUIS.--"A freeman is one who is born free by being born in matrimony, of parents who both are free, or both freed; or of parents one free and the other freed. But one born of a free mother, although the father be a slave or unknown, is free." Tit. 5th. DE LIBERTINIS.--"Freedmen are those who have been manumitted from just servitude." Section third of the same title states that "freedmen were formerly distinguished by a threefold division." But the emperor proceeds to say: "Our _piety_ leading us to reduce all things into a better state, we have amended our laws, and re-established the ancient usage; for anciently liberty was simple and undivided--that is, was conferred upon the slave as his manumittor possessed it, admitting this single difference, that the person manumitted became only a _freed man_, although his manumittor was a _free_ man." And he further declares: "We have made all freed men in general become citizens of Rome, regarding neither the age of the manumitted, nor the manumittor, nor the ancient forms of manumission. We have also introduced many new methods by which _slaves_ may become Roman citizens."